Fake, there's no way the sysadmin wouldn't throw the HR rep who signed the policy under the bus (without some CYA documentation prior).
FirstInitial LastName is common format. I knew someone named Aaron Ryan who got stuck with the email address “aryan@company.com”.
There is no requirement to do so, although GMail's adoption of this non-standard seems to have popularized the practice.
I stand corrected. I haven't used anything other than proton mail in a while and it works there. I thought it was part of the standard
Even if this is a joke, this is a great example of something that happens all the time: people avoiding responsibility by blaming some chunk of software. The electronic equivalent of "No, sir! I didn't kill that person. The butter knife did it!"
Please believe me sounds like I don't know how to manually set emails. No way it cannot be done.
I guess it cannot be done if their IT infrastructure was not designed with that use case in mind. Although I'm not familiar with human resource management software, I don't find this hard to believe at all.
Also, you'll understand what Biron Tchaikovsky meant with "Please believe me" when you look at their email address. They already tried to do it, and probably complained many times before giving up.
The place I work at does something like this, and there was actually quite a bit of trouble when a second person with the same abbreviation joined. The responsible guy seriously suggested fireing the new guy because the policies didn't account for duplications.
